As a child, I hated tomatoes. I couldn’t understand how anyone could enjoy them. My grandmother grew the red fruit in her garden, and every summer I quietly despaired as raw tomatoes made appearance after appearance on the dinner table. The sweet but tangy flavor made my nose wrinkle, and the drippy pulp reminded me of the innards of a human heart—or at least how I imagined they look.

Quite the opposite has happened to me with US politics. As a child, I used to eat up politics. I spent much of my summers at my grandparents’ in the American Midwest, where house rules required that you play outside for the majority of the day. If you wanted to be inside, then you better be reading. My grandparents’ subscriptions to Newsweek and Time meant that a stack of those weekly news magazines were always sitting in the living room, so when I’d tire of rolling around in the grass or thumbing through my latest library loan, I’d pick up a copy, plop down on the “davenport,” and get my fill of 1990s political intrigue. My understanding was, of course, limited by my innocent age—why all the fuss about Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress?—but I nevertheless was captivated by the machinations of the country’s powerful.

I carried that fascination with me into adulthood, and it grew as my grasp on it all increased. When the Internet injected the media industry with a heavy dose of speed, I welcomed the resulting 24-hour mania of political coverage, and working as a correspondent in a storied newsroom made the craving virtually insatiable. For a time, I actually dreamed of becoming a political reporter, chasing lawmakers down the corridors of power for a living.

Whatever the reason, the current US presidential election only seems to be making my allergy worse. I know many Americans at home and abroad are also feeling this way. I don’t gobble up political news like I used to. I turn away from whatever soundbite du jour is circulating. I couldn’t even bring myself to watch Hillary Clinton’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention—a historic moment as the country’s first female major-party presidential candidate, no matter how you feel about her. Neither, for that matter, could I bear to watch Trump’s, whose candidacy has made history for verydifferentreasons.

Despite the queasiness, I do believe we have a civic responsibility to stay informed, so I begrudgingly stay abreast of American political affairs. It’s not as if I could easily escape it all anyway. Like a third of the world’s population, I use social media. Even if I quit Facebook and Twitter and Reddit, a portion of my news diet comes from mainstream US sources, however flawed they may be. And even if I renounced US media for its local counterpart, the Spanish press’ front-page fixation with the Great American Experiment makes it impossible to avoid.

Not to mention, I’m Global Voices’ news editor, and therefore should reasonably keep a finger on the pulse of American politics, if only to be better at my job.

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The Bridge features personal essays, commentary, and creative non-fiction that illuminate differences in perception between local and international coverage of news events, from the unique perspective of members of the Global Voices community. Views expressed do not necessarily represent the opinion of the community as a whole. All Posts